


There Is Such Happiness At The End Of It All

by bibliomaniac



Series: Happiness is a Light in the Dark [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Heavy Angst, Implied Violence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, PLEASE do not read this if you are sensitive to any of these things especially the last one, Psychological Horror, i know how it can feel to be set off by a fic and i really do not want that to happen here, okay i'm really REALLY going to need you guys to read the tags or tws or both on this, this isn't me attempting to hype by the way i am being very goddamn serious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 17:28:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13745811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliomaniac/pseuds/bibliomaniac
Summary: The Starblaster is powered by bonds.Lucretia does not have those anymore.(aka late night psychological horror about regeneration)





	There Is Such Happiness At The End Of It All

**Author's Note:**

> okay i am going to redo the content warnings here because it is so, so important to me that nobody walks into this unprepared for what's going to happen here and then dissociates or something because i have DONE that. so once more, with feeling:
> 
> this is incredibly angsty and includes major character death (and not in the stolen century sense), implied graphic violence, non-graphic suicide, and major psychological horror elements. please, please only read with caution!

The Starblaster runs on an engine powered by bonds. Lucretia knows that; everybody onboard knew that, although some understood better than others. It runs on bonds, and somehow at the end of every cycle and the beginning of a new one, anybody who died in the past cycle is born anew, light pulling from the bond engine and stitching them together again. She’s seen it a hundred times. She knows. The Starblaster is powered by bonds. 

Lucretia stares at the deck of the ship. There are vacancies, there is nobody _there,_ and she sees that, she _sees_ the empty space, but she doesn’t know how to draw the next conclusion from there. Because—they can’t be gone. That’s not possible. 

Everything comes in disjointed flashes. The Hunger comes.  She sees her shield killing everything. She can’t do it. She needs to protect her family in the end after all. She takes the Starblaster. She runs. Space goes wobbly and she pushes the ship through that space and everything freezes and then the universe spits her out again and then—her brain halts again where she’s standing now. There’s nobody there.

The Starblaster is powered by bonds.

Lucretia severed all of hers.

As realization slowly trickles in, air leaves her lungs, and she pitches to the floor and she clutches her head in her hands and she tries to scream, but you can’t scream without air. You can’t reform bonds that aren’t there. You can’t get back people who are gone.

She tries to move the Starblaster back a universe over. She looks all over the ship, desperation making her sloppy. She screams again, and this time there is air, and the sound echoes throughout the ship, but they do not appear.

She maneuvers down to the plane, and it is empty, because of course it is, of _course_ it is. She cries and screams some more and then some more still, and there is nobody to hear her.

It takes only one week for the Hunger to arrive, because it turns out when the Light is captured, _harnessed,_ it is _much_ easier to track. It is a week too long to be alive and alone. It comes down, and she waits for it to kill her like it killed her family ( _likeshekilledherfamily_ ), and she knows that she is being far more merciful to herself than she deserves.

The emissaries of the Hunger step forth, and they are six, and there are red robes over featureless obsidian bodies.

She doesn’t have the voice left to scream. She doesn’t have any tears left to cry. She just has a body for them to tear apart, and she is so grateful it is over. 

She is stitched together again, and she is back on the ship, and there’s nobody there.

(The Starblaster runs on bonds. It does not know what to do when there are no bonds left to run on. But the Light, now, it knows what to do, it was _made_ to Create, and it pulsates cheerily as it stitches back together the woman who _needed_ it _so much_ she destroyed her family. Who could satisfy its need to be needed better than she?) 

(The Light does not like it when the woman spends cycle after cycle jumping off the ship just as soon as it has worked so hard to make her again. It does not like when she lets herself be torn apart by the Hunger again and again. It _very_ much does not like when she breaks the staff housing it, because it was a very nice staff and it enjoyed living there, but the Light has never needed a home to do its work. Just one person, and it has one now, and it turns out that a person begging it to stop feels just as nice as when they beg for its power.)

(It would really like for the woman to stop jumping, though, to stop bouncing her head against the walls, to stop being torn apart, so it creates some friends for her. They are not _her_ friends. The Light lost the blueprint for those long ago. It did not need _them._ But they look like them, and smile like them, and the Light beams the brightest it ever has as it speaks through their mouths and says in unison, “We will be so happy together.”)

**Author's Note:**

> i am very very sorry.


End file.
